10 Incredibly Useful WordPress Widgets

10 Incredibly Useful WordPress Widgets

Contact Forms Related

Contact form 7

By its very name, one can easily guess the functionality of Contact Form 7. It is the manager of multiple contact forms. Also one can modify the form and the mail stuff openly with easy mark-up. The form can support the well-known Ajax-powered submitting, Akismet spam filtering, CAPTCHA etc.

Basically, Contact Form 7 is a WordPress plugin that provides one of the most practical, artless, and easiest contact forms designed for bloggers. If you’ve lately filled out a contact form on a blog, then there’s a high certainty that it was designed by Contact Form 7. As mentioned earlier, Contact Form 7 works with Askimet, so that you can chill with guaranteed ease (the spammers are way far from abusing your contact form).

Photo Gallery Plugin

NextGEN gallery

It is also an incredible WordPress gallery plugin which provides a controlling engine for uploading and handling galleries of pictures. It also has the ability to group upload, adding/deleting /sorting images importing meta-data, grouping galleries into albums, editing thumbnails, and more.

Following are some of its awesome features:

Uploading galleries

Managing galleries which includes centralized gallery management

Easy management of thumbnails

Displays of single image

Editing galleries

Editing of individual images

Intricate display of galleries

Adding watermarks

Albums creator

Multiple gallery viewing types

Slideshow of galleries.

Thumbnails of galleries.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

WordPress SEO by Yoast

Reason being its usage by over 7 million downloads to date, this is the #1 WordPress plugin for its control, ease-of-use, and functionality for enhancing one’s posts for search engines. Basically, this plugin works as easy as the way it sounds: just download it, install the plugin, and it energies to work and gets your blog search engine optimized. According to the frenzied customer reviews, this plugin should not be ignored.

WordPress SEO by Yoast is all in one solution for SEO related essentials regarding your WordPress site as it includes maintaining your SEO titles, XML sitemaps, meta descriptions, breadcrumbs and a lot more.

Blog Statistics Related

Google Analytics Dashboard for WP

This is another hero of plugins of WP as it displays google analytics reports and some real-time statistics right in your Dashboard. Its automatically attaches a tracking code in every single page of one’s website.

Following are some of its features:

Single widget to access all website’s statistics.

Displays real-time visitors, sources and traffic details.

Different colours for your charts, maps and graphs.

Displays top 24 pages, searches and referrers.

It also has the option to display visitors on Geo Map by country.

Use of Pie Charts for showing Traffic.

Social Networking

ShareThis

This plugin is very useful as it allows a blogger’s visitors to share his/her posts or pages with others. Another good things is that it also supports e-mail and posting to social networks. It is a new social tool that allows you to leverage a sort of frictionless sharing without the idea of having to create one’s own custom solution. It puts your users in a direct control over how they share content. Being placed on the right or left side of your content, ShareThis makes it easier for one’s users to share as well as delete and re-share to their social network timeline.

Following are some of its features:

Increased social activity

Choice to select from 120 social channels, including Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook,

Usage of multiple size buttons

Add counters

Sharing Bars

Access to greater insights by creating a Social Analytics Dashboard account

Daily sharing activity per registered domain

Detailed reports on the top shared URLs of your site(s)

Top social channel reports

Track Users' Copy and Paste Shares by CopyNShare feature

Easy sharing because of the hovering bar

Leverage Frictionless Sharing

Caching Plugin

WP Super Cache

This hit plugin is used for static caching in our one and only WordPress. It has the power to generate html files which are served directly by Apache without the processing of comparatively heavy PHP scripts. By the use of this plugin, you may speed up your WordPress blog considerably.

This plugin goes working with generation of static .html files through your dynamic WordPress blog. After the generation of an .html file, your webserver will start to serve that file instead of processing the relatively heavier and affluent PHP scripts of WordPress.

The static .html files will then be delivered to the immense majority of your users, but because of the fact that any user's details are displayed in the comment form as you might have noticed after they leave a comment those requests are managed by the legacy caching engine. Static files are basically served to:

Users who are not signed in.

Users who are logged in but haven’t left a comment on your blog.

Users who are logged in but haven’t viewed those posts that are password protected.

A close to 99% of your visitors will actually be served with static .html files. Those users who don't see the static files have another answer waiting for them and that is that they will see different cached files may not be relatively very efficient but still they will give a better result than the uncached ones.

Super Cache is the tool and plugin you need that saves you in many situations even in the situations such as a one in which your server is underpowered, or if you’re going through heavy traffic. Super Cached html files will be made readily available to users as they are quicker as compared to PHP generated cached files.

E-Commerce

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is yet another dominant and strong plugin that helps you in selling anything. It is free and it features rich, widely supported and used by many successful shops. Extra features and plugins can be expensive, but the simple features set should be enough for most of the small sites.

Following are some of its features:

Strength & flexibilityWooCommerce is known to be built using WordPress best run-throughs on both the front as well as the back end which results in a competent, tough and natural plugin.

Smart dashboard widgets & reportsWooCommerce has a tendency to keep a birds-eye view of sales and incoming reviews as well as general store performance, stock levels and statistics right from the WordPress dashboard or go to the reports section to gain more details on the statistics.

CustomizableYour business is something you do a lot for and so should you do for your online store. One can choose one of the ecommerce themes made available by the WooCommerce or build his/her own and give it a personal and exquisite touch by the use of the built in short codes and widgets.

WooCommerce works with any theme of your liking, including the very basic WordPress themes. Additionally, if you're by any thoughts looking for a well-developed WordPress ecommerce theme which is specifically designed to be used with WooCommerce, you can always go and browse for them in the official WooCommerce Themes.

Additive FeaturesNo matter what you are operating be it a superstore selling hundreds of products, or just a sole trader who is selling artefacts, WooCommerce has you all covered. Moreover, as you must be surely aware of that Payment Gateways and Shipping Methods are a significant matter to any store, WooCommerce is the plugin that comes with all the necessary add-ons such as PayPal Standard, BACS as well as Cash on Delivery.

Comments Related

Akismet

It is top rated plus a gift from WordPress to you, but if for some unfortunate reasons, you haven't activated it which requires adding an API key, you should definitely do it right now. Because every hour you are attacked by hordes of comments and Akismet does the trick to save you a lot of trouble. Let me answer you some of the basic questions regarding Akismet.

What actually is Akismet?It is basically a hosted web service that saves you quite a lot of time by automatically spotting comment and spams that are actually trackbacks. It's actually hosted on our servers, but we give you access to it through plugins and our of course our API.

How does it work?Each and every time a new comment or a trackback, or pingback is added to your site, it is also submitted to the Akismet web service which in turn runs hundreds of tests on the comment and returns with a thumbs up or down in accordance with the result. Pretty easy for you as now you don't have to waste your precious time deliberately and tirelessly in just surfing through and deleting the spammy comments one by one from your blog.

How can Akismet help?Serving the reason for its creation, Akismet is a powerful engine that monitors many of a millions of blogs and forums. And at every precise moment, it discovers the methods and tricks used by malicious users in real time. They have almost all the knowledge about the spambots and buffer sites of the spammers. Akismet uses this precise knowledge to warn you when a spammer, be it an automated one or human, tries to peek comments in your personal blog.

Therefore, I must say with my personal recommendation that if you notice a comment in your spam folder from someone you have no idea of or if it is from some website you’ve never seen the whereabouts of, just download this Akismet kid and it will tell you what exactly are you dealing with.

Blog Security

Wordfence Security

Wordfence Security is an open big class security and performance driving plugin that has the capability of making one’s site up to 50 times quicker and more secure. It is just like a complete WordPress security suite which includes all of it ranging from firewall, malware scanning to strong password enforcement, plugin and theme file repairs and real time traffic overview. Just, awesome.

Following are some of its features:

Login from Cell-Phone

Scanning remotely

Blocking by country

Repairing of Files

Scanning frequently

Scanning scheduled

Support of Premium nature

Real-timeliness of Security Network

Scanning of Core, Plugin and Theme Files

Blocking brute-force attacks

Scanning content for URLs that are bad in nature

Showing of hackers in real-time

Scanning for hundreds of backdoors

Firewall

Scanning for DNS changes

Blocking and Tracking of IP's

Scanning for acknowledged malware

Intelligently blocking networks

Blocking fake Googlebots

Viewing top content leeches

Monitoring disk space

View of crawlers in real-time

Enforcing strong passwords

Checking existing passwords

Blog Backup

BackUpWordPress

According to your suiting, BackUpWordpress will back up all of your site stuff including your database as well as your files. It should come handy so try it now and see how easy and useful it is.

Zainab is a telecommunication engineer from Islamabad, Pakistan having a flair for writing. She loves to read and write on technology and is blogging for years. Among her other favorite past times are photography, crafting, and reading.